Nvidia begins providing notebook graphics drivers

For many years now, the graphics driver packages provided by ATI and Nvidia were rarely functional with notebooks. Due to demands from notebook vendors themselves, both GPU makers were prevented from providing drivers, and users were forced to rely upon the vendor to release updated drivers. Without exception, those vendors would lag behind the latest drivers, and often would abandon them completely in a matter of months. This left many Windows users with few options, especially those wanting to take advantage of performance improvements in 3d applications or just fixing bugs present in older driver releases.

That attitude has slowly been changing, and now Nvidia is announcing their first notebook driver release. Going forward, the company will be providing CUDA-enabled drivers for mobile GPUs, giving any GeForce user an easy way to stay up to date. Part of this change, Nvidia says, is due to the change in their driver architecture, with a switch to a modular design and an unified installation package. The drivers should work on any notebook with an Nvidia GPU and not cause any alterations to vendor-specific functionality, such as notebook hotkeys.

AMD has been working for some time to release drivers for Mobile Radeons as well. As both companies continue to expand upon this, hopefully nobody will have to rely on notebook vendors to provide drivers anymore, and finally keeping up with the desktop world.